The Christmas Banquet (From "Mosses from an Old Manse")

An eccentric will endows an annual Christmas banquet for ten of the most miserable people, and two somber stewards select guests and stage a funerallike feast complete with cypress, a sepulchral urn, and a skeleton as a grim emblem. The invited company embodies diverse dispositions of sorrow and lack—gentle despondency, a man who advertises his emotional wounds, hypochondria, accumulated misanthropy, an earnest but unrecognized idealist, an aging former gallant, a distressed poet, and a melancholic simpleton—each presenting a different mechanism of inner vacancy. The gathering stages human discontent as a temperamental and perceptual condition that resists external consolation.